Steve Powers has the ability to say 10 things in one sentence, which is good when he is trying to paint something fast, especially large-scale murals. My first encounter with Mr. Powers was in Philadelphia about 17 or so years ago. He was working at a copy shop on Walnut Street. I was with my friend Shawn from school and I remember being both intimidated and amused at the same time. I didn't say anything to him, I just listened to him talk and was quite impressed with the words that came out of his mouth, they were hand crafted as if he was thinking about what he was going say all day and then unleashed it when we came in the store.

My next encounter with Steve was about 4 years later on Canal Street in NYC, I was introduced to him this time by Phil Frost where we were all talking in front of some guy's store who didn't like us being there. He told us to get off his sidewalk because we were keeping customers from coming in. Steve just smiled at him and yelled, "KICK MY ASS!" It was funny because Steve was wearing one of his trademark outfits consisting of some sort of colorful counter-fit designer clothing ensemble, which he probably bought from the same place the day before. I couldn't tell if the guy was going to burst out in tears, laughter, or with his fists flailing. It was perfectly intimidating and funny at the same time. He was saying so many things at once with that line as he does with just about everything he says. His words are a mixture of self-defense and ego but also sincere respect, understanding, and a bit of confrontation used in a way to bring light to situations, which need to be dealt with.

Last Winter I got an email from Steve saying to meet him, "tomorrow at noon" at some address in Philadelphia about taking photos for some project. I didn't bother asking him for what, I've seen enough from him in the past 15 years that I knew it was going be worth showing up for, and it was. What I met him for was a meeting about a grant from the Pew charitable trusts to do a project with the Philadelphia Mural Arts, which used to be known as the Philadelphia Anti-Graffiti Network. The project was to be in part as a celebration of it's 25th Birthday, also marking 25 years of Steve's own 25th anniversary as a mural artist on a parallel yet opposite path. It took a while for the scale of the project to sink in, but with the first two murals done in June I knew this was going to be something never seen before on such a magnificent scale. In August, the project really got started. 10, 20, 30 murals in just a couple weeks with help from writers and artists from all over the country and as far as Hawaii gathered to write Love Letters to a fictional girl from a fictional guy for her to read as she takes the elevated subway line in West Philadelphia from 47th to 63rd and back again. Along with a movie being shot, almost 50 Love Letters are now complete.

I conducted this interview with Steve via text messaging. I thought it would be easy but not really. As much as he loves telling you what is going on in his head, it's impossible to gain direct access to his brain. Trying to be clever is pointless 'cause he knows what you are doing, so half of my questions were ignored, here's what I managed to get out of him.

Adam: Steve, Let's do an interview for Fecal Face over the next few days.

Steve: I'm on Amtrak on the quiet car, trying to whisper and I got people complaining at me, "Your on the quiet car!" I say, "What" they repeat themselves louder, and I say, "Why are you yelling on the quiet car?" People just want a reason to be the police. Oh, the Love Letter? That's amazing. You notice how loud Philly sirens are? As loud as New York with NONE of the constant ambient noise NYC has. I'm trying to take a Philly ambulance on Amtrak quiet car, then you'll seeee.

Adam: How does Amtrak compare to Chinatown bus?

Steve: Amtrak has its faults, but you really feel special taking it. I think the stations are a big point of it, but being able to drink and stretch out is major, but when the schedule permits, busses are the truth. I caught the mega bus down here with the Nick - 6 bucks, and I booked a return we didn't use. but we were able to catch the Amtrak back for $45 each and I still feel like we got justice.

Adam: I don't understand why it is so expensive.

Steve: It's pegged more to the business traveler than to the commuter, which makes it prohibitive to most people. To me, to be back in NYC a half hour earlier when my time is worth $100 an hour there, it's a good deal.

Adam: $100 an hour is $2400 a day, I live a month on that in Philly in a big old house and take the $10 Chinatown bus to NYC so much that people think I live there. What am I missing?

Steve: Well really the off hours are free, so its only 1400 a day, and its not what the game charges me its what I charge the game. New York is a great place to make art, when I find time to make it. Then again, even the smallest moments yield important data for making art, and here when you speak you can speak to the world, and not have to raise your voice above a whisper. Oh, and being here and visiting are two different things.

Adam: Do you think Philly sirens are trying to speak to the world, screaming over whispers, or just trying to annoy the passengers on the Amtrak quiet car as the train travels through the city?

Steve: Huh? Sirens and voices on Amtrak can annoy people in similar ways, just breaking the noise threshold you're accustomed to.

Adam: Is having a tiny studio in Manhattan inspiring? I wonder if having too much room is actually counter productive. Sometimes it seems like the people with the most room and tools do the least amount of work. Unless of course it's the entire set of roof tops lining the West Philly EL.

Steve: Yeah, the world is my studio; the 800 sq ft box in Manhattan is just the launch pad. Although I love to work there, I'm usually on a jobsite somewhere else.. Whenever I'm traveling I want to be home and vice-versa. There's a ray Bradbury story about an astronaut with a similar mindset, it resonated with me even before I left home. The only tool you need to get work done is the desperate need to get work done. - Without that your fancy t-square can't help you

Adam: I was impressed by what you wrote in the jumble of letters in the "If you were here" wall. I had no idea about it for weeks after, yet I overheard you talking about how one of the neighbors asked you if you were going to paint a memorial that day. I thought you just brushed it off. The same goes for the subtle tributes you have been sliding into the murals. When does the word "scheme" come into play with your ideas? Is it towards the end of the thought process, or do you know what you are doing the whole time?

Steve: I scheme even in my dreams. I don't scheme on others, that's low rent. When I think of that I think of dudes trying to creep up and take your newspaper off your lawn. I like the spirit of getting what you need by any means, "getting over" if you will, but I'm bound by doing it in a way that doesn't fuck anybody over.

Love Letter is a project by Stephen Powers with the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program and is sponsored by the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage through the Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative. Generous support provided by the Brownstein Group and Septa.

Stephen J. Powers is a New York City artist who at one time wrote graffiti in Philadelphia and New York under the name ESPO ("Exterior Surface Painting Outreach"). He was most well known during the late 1990s for his conceptual pieces as well as his role as the editor and publisher of On the Go Magazine. He has shown at The Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, The 49th Venice Bienalle, The Luggage Store in San Francisco, and had his first museum solo show at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art in 2007. In 2003, He founded the Dreamland Artist Club and partnered with Creative Time to commission over 45 artists to paint signs and rides in Coney Island. This past summer he returned to Coney Island with Creative Time and opened The Waterboard Thrill Ride. As a 2008 Fulbright Scholar, Powers painted a love story in the streets of Dublin and Belfast. He lives and works in Manhattan.

We haven't been featuring many interviews as of late. Let's change that up as we check in with a few local San Francisco artists like Kevin Earl Taylor here whom we studio visited back in 2009 (PHOTOS & VIDEO). It's been awhile, Kevin...

If you like guns and boobs, head on over to the Shooting Gallery; just don't expect the work to be all cheap ploys and hot chicks. With Make Stuff by Peter Gronquist (Portland) in the main space and Morgan Slade's Snake in the Eagle's Shadow in the project space, there is plenty spectacle to be had, but if you look just beyond it, you might actually get something out of the shows.

Fifty24SF opened Street Anatomy, a new solo show by Austrian artist Nychos a week ago last Friday night. He's been steadily filling our city with murals over the last year, with one downtown on Geary St. last summer, and new ones both in the Haight and in Oakland within the last few weeks, but it was really great to see his work up close and in such detail.

Congrats on our buddies at Needles and Pens on being open and rad for 11 years now. Mission Local did this little short video featuring Breezy giving a little heads up on what Needles and Pens is all about.

Matt Wagner recently emailed over some photos from The Hellion Gallery in Tokyo, who recently put together a show with AJ Fosik (Portland) called Beast From a Foreign Land. The gallery gave twelve of Fosik's sculptures to twelve Japanese artists (including Hiro Kurata who is currently showing in our group show Salt the Skies) to paint, burn, or build upon.

Backwoods Gallery in Melbourne played host to a huge group exhibition a couple of weeks back, with "Gold Blood, Magic Weirdos" Curated by Melbourne artist Sean Morris. Gold Blood brought together 25 talented painters, illustrators and comic artists from Australia, the US, Singapore, England, France and Spain - and marked the end of the Magic Weirdos trilogy, following shows in Perth in 2012 and London in 2013.

San Francisco based Fecal Pal Jeremy Fish opened his latest solo show Hunting Trophies at LA's Mark Moore Gallery last week to massive crowds and cabin walls lined with imagery pertaining to modern conquest and obsession.

Well, John Felix Arnold III is at it again. This time, he and Carolyn LeBourgios packed an entire show into the back of a Prius and drove across the country to install it at Superchief Gallery in NYC. I met with him last week as he told me about the trip over delicious burritos at Taqueria Cancun (which is right across the street from FFDG and serves what I think is the best burrito in the city) as the self proclaimed "Only overweight artist in the game" spilled all the details.

Ever Gold opened a new solo show by NYC based Henry Gunderson a couple Saturday nights ago and it was literally packed. So packed I couldn't actually see most of the art - but a big crowd doesn't seem like a problem. I got a good laugh at what I would call the 'cock climbing wall' as it was one of the few pieces I could see over the crowd. I haven't gotten a chance to go back and check it all out again, but I'm definitely going to as the paintings that I could get a peek at were really high quality and intruiguing. You should do the same.

The paintings in the show are each influenced by a musician, ranging from Freddy Mercury, to Madonna, to A Tribe Called Quest and they are so stylistically consistent with each musician's persona that they read as a cohesive body of work with incredible variation. If you told me they were each painted by a different person, I would not hesitate to believe you and it's really great to see a solo show with so much variety. The show is fun, poppy, very well done, and absolutely worth a look and maybe even a listen.

With rising rent in SF and knowing mostly other young artists without capitol, I desired a way to live rent free, have a space to do my craft, and get to see more of the world. Inspired by the many historical artists who have longed similar longings I discovered the beauty of artist residencies. Lilo runs Adhoc Collective in Vienna which not only has a fully equipped artists creative studio, but an indoor halfpipe, and private artist quarters. It was like a modern day castle or skate cathedral. It exists in almost a utopic state, totally free to those that apply and come with a real passion for both art and skateboarding

I just wanted to share with you a piece I recently finished which took me 4 years to complete. Titled "How To Lose Yourself Completely (The September Issue)", it consists of a copy of the September 2007 issue of Vogue magazine (the issue they made the documentary about) with all faces masked with a sharpie, and everything else entirely whited out. 840 pages of fun. -Bryan Schnelle

Jeremy Fish opens Hunting Trophies tonight, Saturday April 5th, at the Los Angeles based Mark Moore Gallery. The show features new work from Fish inside the "hunting lodge" where viewers climb inside the head of the hunter and explore the history of all the animals he's killed.

Beautiful piece entitled "The Albatross and the Shipping Container", Ink on Paper, Mounted to Panel, 47" Diameter, by San Francisco based Martin Machado now on display at FFDG. Stop in Saturday (1-6pm) to view the group show "Salt the Skies" now running through April 19th. 2277 Mission St. at 19th.

For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to quit my job, move out of my house, leave everything and travel again. So on August 21, 2013 I pushed a canoe packed full of gear into the headwaters of the Mississippi River in Lake Itasca, Minnesota, along with four of my best friends. Exactly 100 days later, I arrived at a marina near the Gulf of Mexico in a sailboat.

I'm not sure how many people are lucky enough to have The San Francisco Giants 3 World Series trophies put on display at their work for the company's employees to enjoy during their lunch break, but that's what happened the other day at Deluxe. So great.

When works of art become commodities and nothing else, when every endeavor becomes “creative” and everybody “a creative,” then art sinks back to craft and artists back to artisans—a word that, in its adjectival form, at least, is newly popular again. Artisanal pickles, artisanal poems: what’s the difference, after all? So “art” itself may disappear: art as Art, that old high thing. Which—unless, like me, you think we need a vessel for our inner life—is nothing much to mourn.

Hard-working artisan, solitary genius, credentialed professional—the image of the artist has changed radically over the centuries. What if the latest model to emerge means the end of art as we have known it? --continue reading

"[Satire] is important because it brings out the flaws we all have and throws them up on the screen of another person," said Turner. “How they react sort of shows how important that really is.” Later, he added, "Charlie took a hit for everybody." -read on

NYC --- A new graffiti abatement program put forth by the police commissioner has beat cops carrying cans of spray paint to fill in and cover graffiti artists work in an effort to clean up the city --> Many cops are thinking it's a waste of resources, but we're waiting to see someone make a project of it. Maybe instructions for the cops on where to fill-in?

The NYPD is arming its cops with cans of spray paint and giving them art-class-style lessons to tackle the scourge of urban graffiti, The Post has learned.

Shootings are on the rise across the city, but the directive from Police Headquarters is to hunt down street art and cover it with black, red and white spray paint, sources said... READ ON

SAN FRANCISCO --- The Headlands Center for the Arts is preparing for their largest fundraiser of the year set to go down on June 4th at SOMArts here in the city. Art auction, food, drinks, live music, etc and all for helping to support a great institution up in the Marin Headlands. ~details

ABOUT HEADLANDSHeadlands Center for the Arts provides an unparalleled environment for the creative process and the development of new work and ideas. Through a range of programs for artists and the public, we offer opportunities for reflection, dialogue, and exchange that build understanding and appreciation for the role of art in society.

We haven't been featuring many interviews as of late. Let's change that up as we check in with a few local San Francisco artists like Kevin Earl Taylor here whom we studio visited back in 2009 (PHOTOS & VIDEO). It's been awhile, Kevin...

If you like guns and boobs, head on over to the Shooting Gallery; just don't expect the work to be all cheap ploys and hot chicks. With Make Stuff by Peter Gronquist (Portland) in the main space and Morgan Slade's Snake in the Eagle's Shadow in the project space, there is plenty spectacle to be had, but if you look just beyond it, you might actually get something out of the shows.

Fifty24SF opened Street Anatomy, a new solo show by Austrian artist Nychos a week ago last Friday night. He's been steadily filling our city with murals over the last year, with one downtown on Geary St. last summer, and new ones both in the Haight and in Oakland within the last few weeks, but it was really great to see his work up close and in such detail.

Congrats on our buddies at Needles and Pens on being open and rad for 11 years now. Mission Local did this little short video featuring Breezy giving a little heads up on what Needles and Pens is all about.

Matt Wagner recently emailed over some photos from The Hellion Gallery in Tokyo, who recently put together a show with AJ Fosik (Portland) called Beast From a Foreign Land. The gallery gave twelve of Fosik's sculptures to twelve Japanese artists (including Hiro Kurata who is currently showing in our group show Salt the Skies) to paint, burn, or build upon.

Backwoods Gallery in Melbourne played host to a huge group exhibition a couple of weeks back, with "Gold Blood, Magic Weirdos" Curated by Melbourne artist Sean Morris. Gold Blood brought together 25 talented painters, illustrators and comic artists from Australia, the US, Singapore, England, France and Spain - and marked the end of the Magic Weirdos trilogy, following shows in Perth in 2012 and London in 2013.

San Francisco based Fecal Pal Jeremy Fish opened his latest solo show Hunting Trophies at LA's Mark Moore Gallery last week to massive crowds and cabin walls lined with imagery pertaining to modern conquest and obsession.

Well, John Felix Arnold III is at it again. This time, he and Carolyn LeBourgios packed an entire show into the back of a Prius and drove across the country to install it at Superchief Gallery in NYC. I met with him last week as he told me about the trip over delicious burritos at Taqueria Cancun (which is right across the street from FFDG and serves what I think is the best burrito in the city) as the self proclaimed "Only overweight artist in the game" spilled all the details.

Ever Gold opened a new solo show by NYC based Henry Gunderson a couple Saturday nights ago and it was literally packed. So packed I couldn't actually see most of the art - but a big crowd doesn't seem like a problem. I got a good laugh at what I would call the 'cock climbing wall' as it was one of the few pieces I could see over the crowd. I haven't gotten a chance to go back and check it all out again, but I'm definitely going to as the paintings that I could get a peek at were really high quality and intruiguing. You should do the same.

The paintings in the show are each influenced by a musician, ranging from Freddy Mercury, to Madonna, to A Tribe Called Quest and they are so stylistically consistent with each musician's persona that they read as a cohesive body of work with incredible variation. If you told me they were each painted by a different person, I would not hesitate to believe you and it's really great to see a solo show with so much variety. The show is fun, poppy, very well done, and absolutely worth a look and maybe even a listen.

With rising rent in SF and knowing mostly other young artists without capitol, I desired a way to live rent free, have a space to do my craft, and get to see more of the world. Inspired by the many historical artists who have longed similar longings I discovered the beauty of artist residencies. Lilo runs Adhoc Collective in Vienna which not only has a fully equipped artists creative studio, but an indoor halfpipe, and private artist quarters. It was like a modern day castle or skate cathedral. It exists in almost a utopic state, totally free to those that apply and come with a real passion for both art and skateboarding

I just wanted to share with you a piece I recently finished which took me 4 years to complete. Titled "How To Lose Yourself Completely (The September Issue)", it consists of a copy of the September 2007 issue of Vogue magazine (the issue they made the documentary about) with all faces masked with a sharpie, and everything else entirely whited out. 840 pages of fun. -Bryan Schnelle

Jeremy Fish opens Hunting Trophies tonight, Saturday April 5th, at the Los Angeles based Mark Moore Gallery. The show features new work from Fish inside the "hunting lodge" where viewers climb inside the head of the hunter and explore the history of all the animals he's killed.

Beautiful piece entitled "The Albatross and the Shipping Container", Ink on Paper, Mounted to Panel, 47" Diameter, by San Francisco based Martin Machado now on display at FFDG. Stop in Saturday (1-6pm) to view the group show "Salt the Skies" now running through April 19th. 2277 Mission St. at 19th.

For some reason I thought it would be a good idea to quit my job, move out of my house, leave everything and travel again. So on August 21, 2013 I pushed a canoe packed full of gear into the headwaters of the Mississippi River in Lake Itasca, Minnesota, along with four of my best friends. Exactly 100 days later, I arrived at a marina near the Gulf of Mexico in a sailboat.

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